Bomb Power

By Garry Wills

(Penguin Press; 278 pages; $27.95)

The framers of the Constitution were very upset about George. The Third, that is. To prevent an American king like the English one they had rejected, they resolved after some debate for a president constrained to a limited role, especially in his abilities to wage war - a power they rooted in Congress. The president was "commander in chief," but only to soldiers in uniform, and only when mobilized. The United States would have no king.

Garry Wills is also very upset about George - but Bush, now. A prolific author of astonishing range - from St. Augustine to Henry Adams to Richard Nixon - Wills in "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State" offers a forceful indictment of the 43rd president, and even more of his vice president, Dick Cheney. Wills' outrage is broad: torture, abuse of secrecy, illegal covert operations, signing statements and (in Wills' estimation) unconstitutional expansion of the commander-in-chief power expressed in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. We have come a long way from the framers.

Clearly, something drastic has changed. Wills' first goal here is to trumpet how far the modern presidency has departed from the ideals of the fledgling republic, a "violent break" that amounts to a "quiet revolution." Wills does so by providing long extracts of historical documents - principally the Constitution - and demonstrating by apt placement of emphasis the documents' intended meaning. The result is deeply thought provoking.

His second goal is to explain how we got here, as in the book's first sentence: "This book has a basic thesis, that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots." He explains in the next paragraph that today's abuses "grew out of the Manhattan Project, out of its product, and even more out of its process. The project's secret work, secretly funded at the behest of the President, was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience." For the first half of this impassioned book, Wills offers a condensed account of the development of the atomic bomb in World War II and the rise of the "national security state" under President Harry Truman. He proposes that the first led to the second.

This claim is not persuasive, chiefly on logical grounds. Wills suffers here from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: Just because A came before B does not mean that A caused B. Yes, the atomic bomb preceded the developments that led to the rise of expanded presidential intelligence and war powers, as well as to excessive classification for "national security," and the atomic bomb was indeed invoked by people like Truman, his Secretary of State Dean Acheson and their successors as justification.

But Wills' own evidence shows that the desire for an unfettered executive long preceded nuclear fission. Theodore Roosevelt issued more than a thousand executive orders, unprecedented at the time, and Woodrow Wilson tried to unilaterally make treaties. Plans to give the Air Force autonomy had been under way since 1943, before anyone knew that nuclear weapons were feasible. Bombs don't make strong presidents, people do. The fact that long-standing pressures to expand the presidency succeeded after World War II does not mean that the bomb generated the change.

Wills offers a concise tour through 25 actions, speeches and decisions that clicked together with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 to form the national security state. "The whole structure," Wills tells us, "is outside the Constitution."

Wills hits all the landmarks, but leaves the reader with the impression that the result was premeditated, leaving unmentioned all those decisions that worked the other way: Truman's famously minuscule military budget, his suspicion of intelligence agencies, his early boycotting of the National Security Council, and the fact that nuclear weapons production was slowed after the war so that there were only seven nuclear bombs in 1947 - hardly a stockpile. The upshot of a more nuanced history would only help Wills to argue that these changes were not inevitable.

But the Bomb (always capitalized) only occupies the first half of the book, after which Wills explores secrecy and the "unitary executive" theory of untrammeled presidential power. The atomic bomb drops out almost entirely as Wills documents presidential adventurism in toppling foreign governments, bullying American citizens and centralizing control of information. Every postwar president comes in for censure here, and with reason. This is sobering reading, but this time the fault is not in the bomb, but in ourselves.